Transcendence
by Caged Eternity
Summary: Severus Snape, the shadows whisper. They are frosty and hissing in his ears, and every hair across the nape of his neck is standing on end, every nerve along his spine is tingling in panic. He has never known such an outstanding and inscrutable terror.
1. Ad Lucem

Disclaimer: Harry Potter & company do not belong to me.

A/N: This is a brief vignette that I actually wrote almost immediately following the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but I'm only just now getting around to posting it up. Many thanks to **Scion of Kushiel** for beta-reading this for me, and, might I add, everyone should go read her fantastic story "**Nocturne**"! That being said, there _are_ some DH spoilers contained in this fic, so if you've not finished reading it...well, shame on you, for reading fanfiction before you've even had done with the real thing!

* * *

**TRANSCENDENCE**

**PART I**

**AD LUCEM **

- - - - -

"_What if you slept?  
And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed?"  
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge_

_- - - - -_

Light.

It does not belong here, in this cool and velvet place behind his eyelids, where he knows – he knows – _he knows_ that just moments before there was nothing but shadows and welcoming black.

Fractures. Splinters. Light.

It blazes through the darkness, pinholes and jagged slices of silver-white, puncturing the silky, slate expanse of his mind like a fistful of needles, of whispers, of rain. Fragments of glass tear apart his smooth consistency; and no – no – _no_, he liked it better not-like-this, liked it better how it _was_, with only the merciful sleek veil of smoke across his thoughts, before all this brightness came bleeding through...

It was softer then. It was neither sweet nor gentle, but there was a flushed grey roundness, a silent, all-enveloping relief – not so tender as to beg objection from that corner of his soul that festers still with guilt (why guilt? what for? he cannot quite remember, and yet, cannot forget – ), but cold and crisp, promising of a half-forgiveness that his conscience yields to bear.

And now –

Blinking, squinting; lashes flutter, and skin peels back to enable the vision of two eyes, yellow-white and red-veined, with their sloe-black centers glistening dimly in this new light. The world swims before him: he frowns as he peers through the muddled tapestry of bright and dark and grey in-between, webs of glittering luminescence sprawling across the sloping curve of obscurity.

His hands rise (of their own accord, it seems) to press the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. There is the darkness, again, so perfect and complete –

His hands lower away from his face, and a whistling sigh slips past his lips as he blinks, one final time, and attempts to make sense of the light-riddled grey.

Billows of cloud, thunder-dark, stretch away from where he kneels (why is he kneeling? he was so convinced of lying down), for as far as he can see; the ground (is there a ground?) is blanketed in them, and the sky above is correspondingly bleak. But there –

His thin lips purse, his keen eyes narrow, and he looks – he looks – _he looks_ –

The coils of mist are taking shape, condensing into something foreign and unknown, and yet, at once familiar –

It is a swing set.

And in this moment, Severus Snape remembers his name.

His eyes travel the iron poles, up from their roots fixed firmly into the soil which is appearing even as he watches, across the supporting beam that bridges the top. His gaze trickles down the two long pairs of chains, slides over the two wooden planks that serve as seats, drops to the hollows beneath each swing that mark the twin places where small feet have kicked countless children into the sky.

The real swing set, Severus recalls suddenly, had three swings. Yet that fact seems to him to be strangely irrelevant here.

He stares a little harder, his eyes sifting through the shadows behind and around the swings; in the distance he can make out the vague contours of a slide, a teeter-totter, a sandbox. These all are faint, dim, half-formed and unclear in the phantom light of this insubstantial place –

And Severus realizes, looking down at himself, that he too is only quasi-solid, for he is very certainly _there_ and he is tangible and he is steady, but yet there is a wavering, a flickering – as if, upon turning away, he might only glance back from the corner of his eye, and by this he would surely see right through his own skin –

Only the swing set looks to stand truly corporeal, and as Severus fastens his gaze once more upon it, he is strangely unsurprised to find that a girl is now perched upon one of the wooden board-seats.

She is young and slight, her shoulders still thin, her knees still knobbly in the charming inelegance of childhood. She is wearing a long white cotton nightshirt, and the sleeves are broad and trailing around the small fists that clutch the swinging chains, and the hem falls to lie a scant few inches above her ankles. Her toes scarcely touch the ground, but she is swaying slowly forward and back on the little swing, and she is humming, softly, an off-key song that strikes painful, heartrending chords in Severus's memory. There is a smudge of dirt on her nose.

Her hair is dazzlingly red, and her eyes are an astounding, piercing green. These are the only colors that Severus can find in this grey-scaled not-world. His lips curve upwards into the barest admittance of a smile.

Severus clambers to his feet, realizing as he does so that he, too, wears a white cotton nightshirt, identical to the girl's. He takes a step towards the swings, then another – and as he moves, the shirt grows longer and looser upon him, the hem crawling down from mid-thigh to pass his knees and amble along his shins until he, too, is standing, scrawny and spare, in a nightshirt several sizes too large for his now-youthful frame.

The girl's swinging slackens to a halt, and she stares at him, her green gaze unblinking. Severus's eyes are now exactly on a level with hers.

He eases himself onto the vacant swing, the coarse wood a ready comfort beneath his weight. He pushes off, hesitantly at first, then with greater confidence as the girl on his right shifts to match his pace. She is still humming.

A swathe of darkness falls promptly over his eyes, soft and textile, and for one wild instant Severus thinks it is the Sorting Hat – but his hand whips up to snatch the pointed cloth from his head, and looking at it he sees that it is a sleeping cap, cornflower-blue and patterned over with yellow stars. He glances to his right, and he sees that the girl, too, now wears a cap, the limp peak drooping over her shoulder. The fabric of her hat is emerald green.

Severus tugs the cap back onto his head, and it slips down his lank hair to lie again over his eyes, and he closes them gratefully against the blackness of the lining. Emblazoned upon his eyelids are the green eyes, the red hair, the smudged nose.

Severus smiles, and he tilts back his head, listening to Lily Evans's humming. Oblivion tugs at his blithe, unburdened mind, and he allows his thoughts to sink into unconsciousness.

Severus Snape sleeps, and here – in this place of no time and no thought and no concrete reality – he can swing and swing forever.


	2. Ad Letum

Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all associated parts belong to J.K. Rowling, and I, needless to say, am not J.K. Rowling.

A/N: ...and so, six months later, I have produced part two. It was actually originally written around maybe October, but I rather kept it to myself as I wasn't fully satisfied, and so not until Christmastime did I send it off to the lovely Dutchy (**Scion of Kushiel**) to be beta-read. Following that, she and I were both terribly busy, so only now am I finally putting it up. Otherwise, there's not a whole lot to say about this vignette, except for the fact that you will find it to be drastically different than its predecessor – it's actually meant to be an antithesis of sorts. I expect that in the end this will be a four- or five-part story; it's a study in possibilities, and so...well, we'll see.

Lastly, I owe a tip of the hat to **whitehound** for the phrase "coiling, recoiling", which I have inadvertently stolen from her. I wrote it into my first draft of this piece without a second thought, and not until recently when I was reading the latest update of **Giving Extras** did I realize that "Coil and Recoil" was the title of its first chapter :)

* * *

**TRANSCENDENCE**

**PART II**

**AD LETUM **

- - - - -

"_He who fights with monsters might take care  
lest he thereby become a monster.  
And if you gaze for long into an abyss,  
the abyss gazes also into you."  
- Friedrich Nietzsche_

_- - - - -_

He has never seen such blackness.

His eyes, he knows, are opened wide – he knows this because he has pressed his fingers against the fleshy whites, and his fingers have come away wet (with what? with tears? but he hasn't cried since – ). Yet he flounders in the darkness, desperate and blind, and –

It yawns up to swallow him, cold and dreadfully promising against his cheeks; he feels the earth lurch beneath him, and now his fingers scrabble to gain purchase in the grass that is turning to soil that is turning to gravel that is turning to slick, slick stone that is – where? Where is the ground? It has slipped so suddenly away, and he is falling, he is falling –

He falls.

He spills forth on a torrent of icy fear, swept up and away, limbs flailing –

He flies forward, a cannonball ejected from its berth –

He plummets. He plunges. He sinks like a stone, swiftly down through the murky waters of malefaction.

_Severus Snape_, the shadows whisper. They are frosty and hissing in his ears, and every hair across the nape of his neck is standing on end, and every nerve along his spine is tingling in panic.

He has never known such an outstanding and inscrutable terror.

_Severus Snape_, the wind shrieks again – a hundred voices now, each one distantly familiar in a gut-wrenching, guilt-seething way. He shrinks beneath the accusation laced so cruelly through each spectral throat; he squirms away, coiling, recoiling, as wraith-like hands clutch at his arms and ankles, tugging him, pleading him –

A blaze of fire explodes across his temple. His fingers crawl towards it, towards the thin new line of heat, and his fingers come away wet. His nose (oh, that trembling prow to guide his sinking ship through darkness!) knows the iron-sweet reek of his own blood.

And there is his name again (_Severus Snape_ – as if he could forget!), born wretchedly this time from the lungs of the river beneath him, a scornful expulsion of geyser-like rage. He is tossed upwards and over, pushed down and under and through, little more than a bobbing vessel upon a sea of interminable wrath –

And suddenly, again, he tumbles, thrust abruptly through some crack, some crevice in this cavernous not-place so deep underground – and now he is falling freely through a shaft of endless hollow vacuum airless black –

The belly of the pit, unworldly and unreal, rises up to meet him, and man and earth converge with skull-shattering force. His muscles convulse, and the marrow explodes from his bones as they splinter and snap with the ease of wooden wands, and his organs rupture in a surge of excruciating agony.

And yet – still it is there, the mocking name in his ears: _Severus Snape_. Still _he_ is there, crumpled on the ground in a fragmented knot of suffering. Surely dead, he thinks, but no, he must somehow be living – for he exists. Indeed, how can he die, when his life has already long been extinguished?

A face swims before him, scale-fleshed and serpentine, flat red eyes glinting despite the absence of all light –

Severus blinks, and the image is replaced by yet another face he knows, sunkenly beautiful between its folds of long dark hair, the haunting eyes hooded beneath a predator's angrily furrowed brow –

"Bellatrix Lestrange," Severus gasps-croaks-whimpers, and her pale lips wring into a hungry smile. Severus stares witlessly up at her. "You are a monster."

She laughs, a shrill raking caw that echoes loudly as it bounces up the vaulted tunnel of her throat. "And what, may I ask, are you?" she croons. Rapidly she leans in towards him, and before Severus can think she is kissing him full on the mouth. Severus coughs, and finds he cannot breathe for the darkness that is now billowing voluminously down into his lungs.

"His," Bellatrix spits, her face still less than an inch from Severus's own. "You're his. You've always been his, and so you shall remain. You tried to pretend, _Severus Snape_ –"

"_No pretending_," he chokes out – and he is choking, he is choking on the thick black smog that he can taste between his teeth and along his tongue and down his throat, congealing on the insides of his trachea –

"It's right here," she cries: her fingers close around his limp wrist to yank his broken arm triumphantly into the air, and in the utter darkness his milk-white forearm glows like a beacon. Emblazoned on his flesh is the black skull, the darkest of all marks, branding him forever as an Eater of Death.

"Death," Bellatrix hisses. "What is death? Do you believe in death, _Severus Snape_?"

And she throws back her head, and her voice rips forth in a bloodcurdling howl: she is a jackal, jaws agape, teeth dribbling with venomous spittle as she readies herself to consume her prey.

Severus screams. His throat is raw and puddling up with blood, and he knows that he will never stop screaming.


End file.
